


Safe

by Nomadimouse



Series: pretend it's a seed [2]
Category: A Bug's Life (1998)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Protective Big Brother Flik
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:33:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26419552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nomadimouse/pseuds/Nomadimouse
Summary: Flik doesn't know how to break the news about his upcoming trip to the city to his only friend in the colony, especially since she's still struggling with the aftermath of his big mistake.
Relationships: Dot & Flik (A Bug's Life)
Series: pretend it's a seed [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1920331
Kudos: 9





	Safe

**Author's Note:**

> Reading "Nightmare" before this is helpful but not necessary.

“Canteen, check. Extra grain, check. Map of Ant Island, check-a-roo. Mushroom lamp…now let’s see, I saw it a second ago...ah, there it is! Ch–”

“What are you doing?”

_“Gah!”_

Everything Flik had just verbally checked fell from his arms with a clatter as he spun to face the intruder. Princess Dot stood in the entrance to his room, her Blueberry badge-laden knapsack slung across her chest and an amused expression on her freckled face.

“Oh, sorry Princess! I didn’t see you there,” Flik said, clutching his pounding heart as he began to gather the fallen items. He should have been relieved to see Dot and not a council member coming to retract their decision and throw him out of the colony, but the truth was, she was the last ant he wanted to see at the moment.

Especially since she’d caught him in the middle of packing.

Dot smiled, apparently oblivious to Flik’s rising panic. She bent down to pick up the mushroom lamp that had bumped against her foot and began picking her way through the rest of the debris scattered around his bedroom floor until she came within arm’s length of him.

“I should be the one saying sorry,” she said, holding the lamp up. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Flik took the lamp from her with his free hand, distracted by the opportunity for comic relief. “Oh, you think _that’s_ scary? Watch this.”

He turned around and positioned the lamp beneath his chin, then twisted his face into a scowl and whipped back around. Dot gasped, then broke into giggles.

“Listen up, bub!” Flik huffed, wagging his finger in the air. “We’re down one and a quarter pieces of grain today by my count. What is the meaning of this? If you’d just done your job and collected food like everyone else, we wouldn’t be in this mess. What do you have to say for yourself?”

The princess let out a big belly laugh. Flik bent down and poked her in the chest. “What’s so funny about this, young lady? Aren’t you supposed to be out searching for four-leaf clovers right now? We need all the luck we can get these days!”

“You do a good Mr. Thorny,” Dot said, her blue eyes glittering with mischief. “Can I try?”

Flik handed the lamp to her. Dot positioned it beneath her chin so it cast spooky shadows around her face the way Flik had. She then placed the back of her other hand against her forehead and closed her eyes as she began swaying in place.

“Oh, Mother!” she cried in a high-pitched voice. “Whatever are we going to do with Dot? I just _know_ Flik is filling her head with those crazy ideas of his. I’m so worried I could just…”

Suddenly Dot twirled around with a theatrical sigh and dipped backwards. Flik dropped everything he had just picked up and dove to catch her, making it just in time to use his palms as a cushion for her head.

Dot laid there for a moment, her arms crossed over her chest in a disturbingly corpse-like fashion. Finally she opened her eyes and winked up at him. “Good catch.”

Flik shook his head as he returned her to an upright position, hoping she couldn’t hear just how hard his heart was pounding now.

“You’re too much, Princess,” he chided. “And take it easy on your sister. She’s under a lot of stress, you know.”

Dot rolled her eyes. “She’s just a drama queen. She’ll find any excuse not to let me have fun. If it was up to her we’d all live in bubbles.”

Flik gave her a rueful smile. “Well, she’s not completely wrong about me. Those crazy ideas of mine haven’t gotten us into the best of situations.”

An uncomfortable silence fell between them. Flik knew that Dot had personal experience with the consequences of one of his ideas going horribly, horribly wrong. It was probably the reason she was here now, hanging out in Flik’s room in the middle of the night instead of sound asleep in her own bed.

The night after the grasshoppers came, Flik had found the princess wandering around the anthill in a terror-stricken state, convinced that Hopper had come back to get her. Since then he’d spent almost every night in her room, waiting to leave until she was sound asleep – and often ending up at her bedside a couple hours later, after she awoke from yet another nightmare.

Dot trusted Flik to protect her when the bad dreams came, the way he’d done when all the other ants stood and watched while Hopper nearly fed her to his deranged pet.

 _Leave her alone._ They were just three little words, but they’d been enough. Little did she know how true those words were about to become.

“So, what are you doing with all this stuff, anyway?” Dot piped up, interrupting Flik’s train of thought. She gestured with the mushroom lamp to the canteen, grain, and map that had once again found their way to the floor.

Flik gulped. “Yeah, about that…” he murmured, averting his eyes as he held his hand out for the lamp.

Dot handed it over slowly. Flik could feel her watching him as he walked over to his bed and dropped the lamp inside the leaf pack sitting on top of it. He took a deep breath and turned around to an empty room.

“Dot?”

 _“_ A- _hem.”_

He looked down to find the princess nearly on top of his feet, glaring up at him with an intensity that matched her mother’s. Her arms were crossed.

“Why are you packing all this stuff?”

Flik had known this conversation was bound to happen sooner or later, but he’d desperately hoped for later. He knelt down and gently unfolded Dot’s arms from over her chest, then took her small hands in his own, keeping his eyes downcast. Had she always had that freckle on her toe?

“Dot, there’s...there’s something I need to tell you,” he said. At this moment he became acutely aware that the anthill’s usual din had faded, as though the entire colony were waiting for him to speak.

Before he could say another word, Dot interrupted him.

“Mr. Cornelius says it’s impolite not to look at someone in the eye when you’re talking to them,” she scolded.

Flik chuckled. It was easy to forget that his little pal was a future queen who took royal etiquette lessons when she wasn’t following him around.

“My apologies, Princess,” he said, then took a deep breath and lifted his gaze. Dot’s playfully stern expression couldn’t mask the worry in her eyes.

Flik made his best attempt at a smile, as though he were about to deliver exciting news. It had felt much more thrilling to present this idea before the council.

Then again, it wasn’t the council members who came to him in the middle of the night when they were worried about grasshoppers hiding in the shadows of their room.

“I’m going away for a little while,” he finally said, watching as his friend’s expression slowly morphed into alarm. “It won’t be for too long, just until I find what, er... _who_...I’m looking for.”

Dot tilted her head. “Who are you looking for?”

“I’m going to the city to find warrior bugs that can fight the grasshoppers off when they come back.”

Flik braced himself for what came next. He’d spent all week preparing for every single reaction she might have: crying, yelling, pleading with him to stay, all of the above. He knew exactly what to say and do in each case: how to refute her arguments, where to find the nearest tissues, when to...

“Cool!” Dot cried, startling Flik from his thoughts. She leaped up and began bouncing on his bed, her wings fluttering behind her. “I’ve always wanted to go to the city! When are we leaving? Should I start packing tonight, too? Can Aphie fit in your backpack?”

Flik’s heart plummeted to his stomach. He watched his leaf pack move closer and closer to the side of the bed with each of Dot’s bounces, searching in vain for the right thing to say. None of the scenarios he’d imagined dealing with included her wanting to _join_ him on his trip. How could he have overlooked this possibility?

“Dot, you can’t...you can’t come with me.”

She stopped bouncing. “Why not?”

The pack teetered on the bed’s edge. Flik could see the blue glow of the mushroom lamp – the only thing that had made it inside since he started packing – through it. “It’s a dangerous mission, and I need to be the one to do it. I need to help the colony fix my mistakes. Nobody else should get hurt on my behalf.”

Dot jumped down and put her hands on her hips, standing on tip-toe so the curl of her antennae almost reached Flik’s nose. The mushroom lamp rolled out of the pack and under Flik’s bed, illuminating the darkness beneath it.

“That’s stupid,” she said. “What if _you_ get hurt? Who will help you?”

Flik rubbed his hand over his face to stifle a groan. Dot had more stubbornness inside her two-centimeter frame than anyone else he knew. How could he explain this to her? If the idea of going to a big, bad city didn’t scare her...

_Scare._

An idea popped into Flik’s mind.

“Do you have your chart?” he asked.

Dot brightened at this. She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a wrinkled piece of leaf parchment.

“That’s what I came here to show you!” she cried, unfurling the parchment to reveal a line graph with crudely drawn grasshopper faces climbing up the Y-axis. She pointed to the dot furthest to the right. “Look! Last night was almost down to Molt. And I only had two this time.”

Dot beamed at him, clearly proud of the progress she’d made.

It broke his heart.

After that first night of bad dreams, Flik had come up with the idea of having Dot keep a chart to track their frequency and intensity. She ranked her nightmare’s scariness level on a scale from one to ten: ten being Thumper, one being Molt. Hopper was an eight, which was where most of them landed.

Her average was three a night, five on the really bad ones. And it had already been a week since their visit. A week since he’d screwed everything up.

“Dot,” he whispered. “I’m so glad your nightmares are getting better. But –” He tapped on the paper in her hand. “–this? This is my fault.”

She blinked, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“It was my fault what happened to everyone. What happened to _you_. And it’s my fault they’re coming back.”

Dot looked down at the chart again, her lower lip wobbling. A dark spot appeared on the left side of Hopper’s face. Flik reached beneath her chin and tilted it upwards, feeling a wet warmth on his fingertips.

“So you were right, I could get hurt. That’s the risk I need to take. This problem is too big for us, Princess. We need to find someone else, someone big enough to handle it, and it has to be me. Do you understand?”

Dot nodded silently, tears spilling over her freckled cheeks. Without warning she threw her arms around Flik’s neck, her tiny frame trembling against him. The sound of crinkling parchment filled his antennae.

“But who will keep me safe while you’re gone?” she whispered.

A lump rose in Flik’s throat. This was a reaction he’d expected from the beginning, but now he found himself at a loss for words. There weren’t any magic phrases to comfort her, no promises that would make everything better. 

Flik never asked why it was his name Dot called when she was afraid. It may have been his fault that she’d ended up in a nightmarish situation to begin with, but he’d also been the one to get her out of it.

_Leave her alone._

And now he was the one leaving her.

So instead of wracking his brain for words that couldn’t fix it, Flik decided to do the same thing he’d done after Dot’s first bad dream.

He wrapped his arms around her, cradled her head against his chest, and waited for her to fall asleep.


End file.
